This paper analyses the evolution of the safety and soundness of the European banking sector during the various stages of the Basel process of capital regulation. In the first part we document the evolution of various measures of systemic risk as the Basel process unfolds. Most strikingly, we...

In autumn of 2007 Britain experienced its first bank run of any significance since the reign of Queen Victoria. The run was on a bank called Northern Rock. This was extraordinary, for Britain had been free of such episodes because by early in the third quarter of the 19th century the Bank of...

The present crisis has revealed that, as expected, much of the safety net for handling failures in the banking system is deficient, particularly for cross-border banks, and the present problems had to be handled by a range of ad hoc measures. The principal new measure that needs to be undertaken...

This paper gathers the longest available historical monthly return series for the Finnish equity, bond and money markets as well as inflation. The series are analysed to calculate the statistical characteristics of the returns investors would have received in these markets. We also survey...

This paper presents a new monthly value-weighted, all-share total return index for the Finnish stock market. The index covers the period from the establishment of the Helsinki Stock Exchange in October 1912 to the beginning of 1970, after which the WI index by Berglund et al (1983) and later in...

This paper continues the data collection procedure and analysis set forth in Nyberg and Vaihekoski (2009). A number of new time series that are commonly used in finance literature are collected, created, and analyzed for the first time. These series include, among others, monthly dividend yields...

In this paper I analyse the determinants of commercial banks' demand for reserves in the interbank market. I first document the pattern in the Eurosystem, where banks deviate from the required reserves balance at the start of the maintenance period only to meet the requirements closer to the...

Using recent advances in time-varying spectral methods, this research analyses the growth cycles of the core of the euro area in terms of frequency content and phasing of cycles. The methodology uses the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and also Hilbert wavelet pairs in the setting of a...

The emergence of the New Consensus in monetary policy has been followed by a renewal of interest in central banks' operating procedures, and specifically in the role of open market operations. There is a general view that overnight interest rates are most effectively controlled by standing or...

We apply textual analysis to extract the tone (sentiment) from the introductory statements to the ECB’s press conferences regarding economic outlook. By combining this information with Eurosystem/ECB staff macroeconomic projections, we are able to directly estimate the Governing Council’s...